Taunton City Council votes to buy new DPW hot box

Thursday

TAUNTON – Pot holes beware: Taunton’s DPW is about to get its second hot box.

The city’s public works department already has two so-called hot-box trucks, each of which carry up to four tons of hot asphalt.

The City Council voted Tuesday night to approve a request from the DPW to transfer $26,490 from the city’s general fund to purchase a third metal heated box.

Unlike the two existing hot boxes — one of which the DPW says has become unreliable and prone to malfunction — the new one will be mounted to a trailer, which can then be hauled by pickup truck to various trouble spots.

Each hot box can carry up to four tons of hot mix.

The Council last week approved a request by Mayor Thomas Hoye to allocate $700,000 into the DPW’s oil-and-roads account, to pay for anything related to the process of filling in potholes — including supplies, overtime and police detail officers.

Councilor Deborah Carr, who chairs the City Council’s public works subcommittee, said the new hot box will probably be in use either by the end of this week or early next week.

A three-man DPW crew was out Wednesday with a hot-box truck shoveling hot asphalt into potholes and cracks that have become a common sight, as a result of this winter’s cold and wet weather.

DPW street-division employee Mike Hayes said the company selling the trailer-mounted hot box allowed workers to test it out for a day a of couple weeks ago.

“It’s awesome,” Hayes said, when asked how it performed.

The city in 2015 spent $175,000 to buy its first portable asphalt-recycling machine, which cooks up hot mix using unwanted road pavement.

That Bagela brand recycler is now kept across the street from the DPW’s main facility on Ingell Street.

Tony Abreu, Taunton’s assistant DPW commissioner, said buying that piece of equipment has worked out well.

“It’s already paid for itself,” he said, referring to the savings of not having to purchase asphalt from a vendor.

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